Acceptance

In my last session I asked my pdoc if he thought my medication was helping me. He said, "I don't think it will be any one thing that will help your depression". I took it to mean I need to do lots of different things (medication, more socialization, art, writing, etc.). His body language and the tone in his voice looked and sounded sorrowful though, like he was trying to tell me my depression may never go away.

Last night I woke up thinking about our discussions in previous sessions about acceptance and about really taking advantage of the times I do feel okay, about not allowing the good, or relaxing moments to be muddied by guilt, or stress, or paranoia...I know, I know...easier said than done.

I realize now that I may be severely depressed forever, and I may need to learn to live with that. or live around that. Not quite sure how, and I really do not want to, but I suspect I have to accept was is.

Rage

ROOOOAAAAARRRRRRR! 

(Picture from University of Saskatchewan...May be copyrighted)

I had a dream last night. It was dusk. That exact time of night where you cannot see anything clearly, not dark, but not light either. I was in a yard crouching by a hedge when I saw a man walking towards me with a massive grizzly bear on a leash.
The man accidentally dropped the leash and the bear escaped.

I saw the bear racing towards me and I dropped to the ground. I thought if I could stay perfectly still the bear would not see me. I was so still I could hear my heart pounding. I was so scared every tiny move I made was projected one hundredfold. The bear tried to grab me and I ran.

I ran to the house, climbed onto the window sill, then up onto the porch and finally onto the roof. The bear was raging angry and began to rip boards off the house. With the tremendous power in his paws he ripped the whole house, walls, porch, doors, roof, apart except the frame. I clung to the top of the house terrified and then I woke up.

In my appointment today this dream came up. I thought of me as the scared person on the roof, but if I look at myself as all the characters in the dream I am also the person who released the rage, and the person raging. I believed my depressed persona is the person afraid of the rage.

I have so much anger inside that I am afraid to let it out. I am afraid of its power and its potential for destructiveness. I often feel like I am a volcano about to explode and destroy everything in its path. I get these intense desires to destroy things, to hurt myself, to kill myself in really violent ways. They are only thoughts, but all the feelings of rage come with the thoughts. I feel so afraid I will lose control and destroy everything around me, just like the bear in the dream.

My pdoc says I need to be able to feel the anger, without releasing it in a destructive way. I do not really understand what he meant. I am not one to destroy things...I DO just FEEL like destroying things...and it is an awful feeling. All I want is for the anger to go away. It is not me.

Wellness Within

My Mom came to my Pdoc appointment yesterday. She is dying and wanted to know if I am, and will be, in good hands. She also had some concerns about how dependent she felt I was on my Pdoc.

She told him her worries and he said, in fact he encourages a maternal type of dependence. The type of dependence that will allow me to feel safe enough to grow. He and I have discussed this issue at length because I am what he calls, "fiercely independent"...(translation...stubborn)...and I hate being dependent on anyone or anything.

Part of why leaving my job was so hard is because I had to give over my autonomy to some degree. Suddenly I am not in control of my financial situation. Given my current inability to work the insurance company and the government are who I rely on financially. This stresses me out, so much so that I see people spying on me all the time. I feel like I am being watched. I feel like they are looking for any excuse to boot me off insurance before I am well enough to take care of myself.

Last month the insurance company sent a letter to my pdoc asking for all his notes from all our sessions...this freaked, and freaks, me out. I was forced to sign an authorization to disclose the information, or I would not receive insurance. So much for "consent". I feel so unsafe now and wish I had not said some of the things I did about feeling I was being spied upon, about not liking my job, about being afraid of losing my insurance etc., etc.

On a more positive note, at one point in my session I said "When I get well...". Dr X. looked at me, and at my Mom, and said, "You have wellness inside you, as do you" (to my Mom who has just been diagnosed with terminal cancer).

I thought about it. I now see that for years I have been working to try to achieve some state of mind outside myself, looking to be someone different from who I am, looking to somehow be a different entity all together.

What Dr. X was saying is that I have wellness inside me already. I just need to grow and nourish that which is already there. I found this a very profound, Buddhistlike thought.